Biographies

Born in Le Havre on June 3rd 1877 in a family which was to count nine children, Raoul Dufy soon showed some rare talent for drawing. Forced to earn a living at 14, he interrupted his studies to work in a coffee importing firm in the harbour of his native city and also attended night courses at the School of Fine Arts.

After his military service he went o Paris where he lived with Othon Friesz, who was also from Le Havre. There he studied under Léon Bonnat but found academic painting quite boring and preferred the works of Van Gogh, Gauguin and some Impressionist painters instead.

Impressionism represented in his view an ideal solution to what he wished to produce at the start of his career. From then on, Dufy engaged himself in a kind of permanent quest.

Impressionism was simply a step between 1900 and 1904. Then Dufy fell under the influence of the Fauves after being mesmerised by Matisse's painting Luxe, Calme et Volupté. Still he only adhered to the Fauve movement during three years until 1909 after finding that he needed to instil more austerity and soberness in his works.

Cubism was apparently a new solution but was in opposition to his real motives. It however enabled him to discover Cézanne and after a trip to Munich his true personality started to blossom though the public was not immediately receptive to his works.

Dufy wanted to produce what he liked and accepted the offer of fashion designer Paul Poiret to make fabric designs. The Poiret dresses worn by elegant women of his time eventually led to his success.

Dufy was then much in demand and accepted an offer to work for the Bianchini-Ferrier textile firm from Lyons. Nevertheless, he did not give up painting and produced many interesting works between 1918 and 1940, the year this music-lover started to paint a series of philharmonic and chamber orchestras.

Dufy then settled in Forcalquier, Southern France, where the climate was more suitable for his health but died on March 23rd 1953.

Dufy produced some 2000 paintings, 4000 water-colours, thousands of drawings and many prints during his prolific career. He imposed himself as one of the greatest masters of the 20th Century regarding the use of colours, notably in his vivid, aerial and fresh water-colours produced with incredible speed.

His greatest work was La Fée Electricité which he made for the French electric company E.D.F in 1937. This impressive 60 metre long and 10 metre high painting, retracing the entire history of light through all human inventions and mythologies, now exhibited in the Paris Museum of Modern Art, was probably the biggest art piece achieved during the 20th Century.

Regarding his achievements, Dufy's vision was strong enough to affect, in a broadly disseminated, popularised manner, the colour, design, texture and imagery of a very wide range of commercially manufactured products : book wrappers, perfume advertisements, posters and stage décor, textiles for furniture and clothes, decorated china and glass.

Dufy formulated practically all modern fabric design between 1909 and 1930 and much of it in the earlier period before 1920. His style most radically influenced the popular arts and the commercial design of the Western world.

Dufy invented a cultivated and lovingly tended Paradise, in the ancient Persian sense of an enclosed and protected garden, which was also an affectionately defined territory. At the one end, there are the fishermen and the yachts, with the nearby sunlit and orchard-strewn landscape of Normandy. In the centre are the wheatfields and vineyards of Burgundy. At the other end, in the south, there is the vivid Mediterranean world of palm-fringed promenades and beaches, casinos, bathers and butterflies as an enchanted playground.

In all his paintings of interiors, the studio series or hotel rooms, Dufy used the disclosures of doors and windows without curtains as a spatial trap and as framing and formalising devices to emphasise the formal interplays between interior and exterior space and perspective. This intriguing game was further complicated by a reflective mirror such as in the beautifully composed and orchestrated Interior with an opened window of 1928.

In 1927 in Vallauris, the pillars and archways supporting the blue domed ceiling of the pavilion high above the town also frame separated vignettes of landscape, all of course with blue sky which echoed the blue-domed interior. In L'Atelier, l'impasse Guelma of 1937 he turned the whole interior view of his studio into an abstract composition of flat coloured planes, subtly textured and lit, which were the foreground or push back into space. Dufy had turned his studio into the purest painting and it was one of his greatest masterpieces. One can understand why its present owner had to wait for fifteen years before Dufy accepted to part with his painting.

Dufy worked in the coffee importing offices by the shipyards at Le Havre during his youth and this potent symbol of exotic, faraway countries and long voyages stuck to his memory. Outside his studio, he painted sailing ships with billowing sails like La Caravelle. He also painted scattered still-life of grapes, melon and strawberries on the grass, possibly a souvenir of a picnic.

With Picasso, Braque and Marie Laurencin, Dufy was part of the group that was closest to Apollinaire, the famous poet. L'Obelisque, the link with antiquity, with Apollo and Cérès, first seen in a painting of La place d'Hyères, l'obélisque et le kiosque à musique of 1927, and Le Donjon, the romantic brick ruins of a dungeon in Normandy, first seen in a beautiful bucolic Composition of 1924, sometimes called Harvest, which also shows a still life, and in the wall hanging for Paul Poiret in 1925, L'Aqueduc ou l'été, where the still life on the grass made another appearance. These motifs recur separately or together in many works and figure most tenderly and spaciously in the four great mural decorations made for Mr Arthur Weisweiller's villa L'Altana in Antibes in 1928-29.

Dufy's characteristic use of a compact tersely eloquent calligraphy and pure, clean, fast-flowing line is perhaps the most radical extension in the first half of the 20th Century of Van Gogh's passionately forceful and explosive handling of line and colour in his own later paintings, and particularly in the drawings made with a reed pen, as Bryan Robertson wrote in his introduction of the catalogue of the Dufy exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery in London from November 9th 1983 until February 5th 1984.

Dufy was enthralled all his life by Persian art. The floating line and exquisitely turned hieroglyphic notations for wheat-ears in another masterwork, Le Grand Champ de blé of 1933, as well as the abstractly shaped areas of colour, showed this very clearly. The woodcuts produced in a primitive way by Gauguin were also a source of inspiration in early drawings and designs.

The second but really co-existent factor in Dufy's art was obviously colour, mostly unconstrained by tonality. The colour in Dufy is never more than approximately contained by the form and sometimes it is set against the form in abstract emotive counterpoint.

Occasionally, colour was liberated entirely, in floating patches of maximum intensity and brilliance in their own right, as an independent celebration. This occurred pre-eminently in the L'Altana murals of 1928-29 and in Le Grand Champ de Blé of 1933 where colour assumes this independent action as well as serving descriptive purposes while line sets the scene.

Dufy's combination of fast speed through line and attack with vivid colour is by its nature free of nostalgia, a crucial 20th Century freedom in art, and in Dufy's art the combination of forces hits a modern nerve with special gaiety, verve and spiritual vibration. To set against our ferocious destruction of youth in this century by two wars, there have been two eras in which youth, more than in any other epoch for centuries, has enjoyed some kind of focus of attention and a specially sympathetic ambience. In the 1920's, a privileged minority were on a spotlit stage until the great depression brought widespread unemployment and a more sober society. For a broader cross-section of very young men and women in the 1950's and early 1960's there was another great epoch of freedom and brightness.

Dufy's own special feeling for luxury was inherent in his approach to nature. The love for each blade of grass, every insect, each flower and every delightful prospect of tree and glade was also in his paintings, and his printed materials.

Such a delicate balance between worldliness and pure spirit in the face of nature has been in French art from Fouquet to Bauchant and has been extremely moving.

Dufy enjoyed this sense of luxury in the abundance of nature and simply conveyed its essence and the strollers on the promenade, the flowers or the fishermen or the harvesters or the swimmers and the rowers, even the motorcars and the familiar landmarks of Paris, devised by men, were all embraced as part of this nature.

It was a trustful and loving vision despite the fact that Dufy lived through two world wars and endured a crippling form of arthritis which trapped him in a wheelchair during the last decade of his life.

Born in 1877, he grew up in the last quarter of the 19th Century with direct links with the Arts and Crafts movements, the awareness of Japanese art, Persian art, primitive art, Gauguin and the Impressionists and the intimate, dense but finely wrought and patterned evocations of domesticity by the Nabis and Vuillard. Dufy himself should be regarded as the most faithful and consistent of all the Fauves. During the first years of his career, he was probably at his best regarding the construction of his works with pure colours evenly balanced from 1905 until 1912. At the turn of the century, he had produced paintings in a style reminiscent of that of Boudin, notably with his Plage de Sainte-Adresse showing women, men and children seated or standing on the beach or strolling on a wooden pier barring the middle of the painting.

It was remarkable that Dufy embraced the 20th Century so wholeheartedly, to become, unknowingly, one of the most brilliants props or totems of the jazz age after his turn-of-the-century groundwork in painting impressionist beach scenes. He then ended by painting the gigantic visual equivalent of a massively scored oratorio or choral symphony The Fée Electricity mural, the biggest painting in the world, in 1937-38.

None of the female models in Dufy's nude paintings seem- with the exception of the majestic pagan courtesan in Grand Nu Bleu of 1931, and some nudes in late paintings in the 1940's painted in Perpignan- to be either big in their proportions or particularly tall. He clearly mostly liked smallish girls and this what we see again and again, small girls with pensive dark eyes, seen usually from above so that their legs seem foreshortened, in a pose that is at once slightly challenging, looming up towards the spectator. Dufy's nudes have nothing about them the ambiguous abandonment of the childlike sordidness of Pascin's nudes but there is a faint link in their individuality, in their strongly personal presence, in emphatically characterised postures in very specific interiors.

The painting Les deux modèles of 1930 summed up Dufy's approach to the female nude : one girl standing and the other girl sprawling in rest : a feeling of studio life, of work, of serious purpose, but also that pulsating undercurrent of life in a room with your clothes off, of challenge, physical ease, sensuous isolation, and alert sexuality. His models are girls, all showing innocent grace, and not just models.

Dufy adored Boucher but his own instinct for animality, whatever its degree or pitch, was tempered, often, by a curious vein of something akin to melancholy, a bitter-sweet resignation or acquiescence in the face or body of the female subjects which Dufy seemed to lovingly respect, and which is hard to find in Boucher whereas the woman in Matisse's and Picasso's works was the recipient of a straight sexual stare. On the contrary, Dufy was the only artist in modern times to create an aura of protection around his models of such extraordinary tenderness.

His exceptional fluency, grace and spiritual refinement can be seen at its most complex convergence in the drawing of Le Pont de Nogent with the lines darting and swooping and then coming to rest, then moving on, relapsing into tangled skeins of tones, form and volume, skimming away, and up to indicate, beyond the flags and the bridge, and the foliage : space, light and atmosphere.

Dufy matched this mastery in his designs for fabrics, made between 1911 and 1933, at first for Paul Poiret's dresses which founded the modern shape and style for women and opened a door late for Chanel and Schiaparelli and then for the great Maison Bianchini-Férier in Lyons. Dufy's designs were so great because of their endless fertility of ideas. These were never trivial and their consummate sense of style, of fitness, never flagged. In fact, the artist always seemed inventively to be several steps ahead of others, with even more ideas in reserve. With him there was no sense of strain and complacency.

There was implicit modesty in their conception, a modesty that one does not find elsewhere in modern design. Dufy was at ease producing designs for silk, satin, brocade or cotton fabrics and had always in mind the fact that he was working on something else than a sheet of paper or a canvas. In this domain, he was an inventor of genius though he did not invent a language of forms quite so radically as Matisse. He however gave something personal and dynamically alive to the 20th Century. He invented his own world.

A good many of the fabric designs produced by Dufy in fact anticipate many of the later themes and pursuits of advanced abstract art in later decades. They also touch on the pop art of the 1960's in those designs in which irreconcilable opposites are made to work together, like flowers and other emblems super-imposed over graded stripes.

There is no doubt that Dufy looked a great deal at Persian, Indian, Chinese or Japanese textiles but he never just tried to adapt his designs from some grand source. Dufy's roses notably were endless series of lyric poems.

Dufy was most famous for his scenes of racecourses and yacht races or regattas. These were delightful records of a given time and place.

His painting of La Grande Baigneuse was heroic by any standards and even the later racecourse and yachting paintings show a strong abstract predilection which continually goes far beyond mere topography. These paintings are like visual tone-poems, with their veils and bands of colour, their merger of sea and sky into one enveloping great sweep of blue, structured by squares of light, their own scintillating areas of colour setting up a counterpoint at variance with the objects depicted. The scenes of yachting regattas with their strings of brightly coloured flags are obviously abstract in many ways, but even more emphatically abstract are those yachting subjects in which the furling of sails and other convolutions of air, sea, light, space, wheeling gulls and spiralling in swirling conical and triangular shapes- the sails being transformed into a series of magical evocations of movement which, however practical at the start, end in Dufy's hands as abstract structures of great beauty.

His racecourse scenes have the same qualities with the figures becoming essences, wraiths, or like flowers, everything being again given up to the crisp, jaunty interaction between green turf, red brick buildings, white railings, multi-coloured crowds, green trees against blue sky with sprightly puffs of clouds. Dufy was a celebrator as well as an inventor and he loved festivals whenever he could find them, on land or on sea.

Given the dazzling range of Dufy's, it has to be said that the quality of invention, right through his mature working life, is overwhelmingly high. Equally forceful is the constant seriousness of the work, and the purity and inspired concentration in his approach to every aspect of painting and drawing. Dufy never coasted along, never took refuge in easy solutions though some of his works tend to reflect some easiness.

Dufy conducted himself in an indomitable way during his last years when arthritis kept him in a wheel chair. Still, he managed to work in a somewhat cheerful way.

Auction-room prices for Dufy have risen steadily during the past 30 years while the artist has been much cherished by collectors in Europe and in the United States as well as in Japan.